The foreclosure auction to see who will get the property that’s housed Elevated Mountain Distilling Company since 2016 has ended with Kenneth Wells of Key West, Florida coming away with the top bid of $630,000.

Businesses and residents affected by severe weather, wildfires and winds from March 30 through April 6 of this year are now eligible for low-interest disaster loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Eleven months to the day after Haywood County awoke to unprecedented flood damage along the Pigeon River resulting from torrential rains the day before, Emergency Services Officer Zack Koonce and Director Travis Donaldson told commissioners they’d secured grant funding to bolster reporting and warning systems.

A bill advanced by Rep. Mark Pless (R-Haywood) to make school board and municipal elections in Haywood County partisan has fallen short, but could eventually be revived. 

Although the indirect benefits of the unprecedented tourism boom that’s enveloped Haywood County over the past few years are readily apparent in the form of increased sales taxes and steady work for hospitality industry professionals, locals are finally about to get something out of it besides soaring housing costs and crowded attractions.

While studying English at the University of Mary Washington, Christina Bendo decided to, by chance, take an elective one semester — pottery. 

Within its upcoming sophomore album, “American Pastoral,” rising Haywood County-based Americana/rock act The Brothers Gillespie has cultivated a vast, vibrant landscape of sonic and lyrical textures.

A much-needed, much-lamented bridge replacement project planned for U.S. 74 in Haywood County will be postponed, per a June 10 statement from North Carolina Department of Transportation Division 14 engineer Garrett Higdon.

The biggest knock against North Carolina’s city- and county-based Tourism Development Authority system is that while it does collect and spend room occupancy taxes to market specific cities and counties as travel destinations — driving Western North Carolina’s tourism-based economy — it does almost nothing for residents of those destinations who have to bear the brunt of soaring housing costs due to short-term rentals, overcrowded attractions and excess demand on infrastructure like roads and water systems.

For the first time in its 45-year history, the Haywood County Arts Council is celebrating Pride month with its ‘Living with Pride’ exhibit, a collaboration with Waynesville’s own Curatory Gallery.